THE NEW AMERICANS : AMERICA: A CONFLICT OF IMAGES AND REALITIES : FARID MOHAJER, from Tehran, Iran

Whether through natural cataclysm, pestilence or genocide, the chronicle of history is rife with human dislocation. The Old World offered its uprooted the daunting spectre of the unknown. The new still offers America.

At 18, Dan Nadler of Romania is quietly flourishing in the heady atmosphere of free speech and other discoveries in his government and civics classes at El Rancho High School in Santa Fe Springs, and sensing as well the subtle distance his education is creating between himself and his parents, who still feel the grim constraint of Iron Curtain memories.

Marcelo Filardi, a 25-year-old Brazilian musician, is amazed at how eagerly American pop musicians jump at the chance to make a buck and re-tool their talents to the latest commercial blueprint; he claims that comparable musicians in Brazil are disdainful of get-rich-quick motives--or at least their outward show.

They are two of a number of people interviewed by Calendar who have come to the United States within the past two years and therefore still live in the anxious interregnum between two worlds--the old, with its ancestral universe of landscape, family and friends and the restorative moods of place, and the hard and fast new, whose unfamiliarity is redeemed by the promise of the future.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 625,000 immigrants showed up at our borders in 1986--at least that’s the number who registered themselves. Some came to make money or to get an education. Some got out the back door when a new dictator’s police force came through the front with guns blazing. Some left dead-ended economies, some sifted out of refugee camps.

What many fail to anticipate in their hoped-for freedom is that America is a culture as well as a polity, and that it can often assault old country values. Few know to expect the deep loneliness of being set apart by language and customs, the confusing voracity of the American tempo, the sheer enervating grind of having to make a living, and the endless traffic of media imagery.

In addition to Dan Nadler and his parents and Marcelo Filardi, we spoke to a Vietnamese refugee family whose American deliverance came through a bottled message that had drifted across the Pacific Ocean for years; an Iranian family twice removed from the pleasurable and orderly customs of the past, first by the Ayatollah Khomeini, then by the struggle to make ends meet in the United States; and a Cuban emigre to whom nothing in American culture is seriously suspect except its (to him) naive complacency toward communism--after 18 years in jail as a political prisoner, he’s just happy to be here.

How do they see our culture? Largely as a mirror of a prodigiously exuberant, outgoing, optimistic people, tinged with the portent of moral decay.

A couple of them are leery of the press--what was once a handmaiden of oppression is now impertinently, even dangerously free. All are more or less at sea in the language, whose unfamiliarity and elusiveness seals them off from the full-blown sense of having arrived, of taking part, of being here.

Almost all of them are concerned to one degree or another with the corrosive pressures the American Way puts on family life. They all come from cultures where the support systems of family are virtually sacrosanct. If family was hallowed then, it’s all they have now. Shahin Mohajer was raised in Iran’s tradition of sexual protectiveness toward women. Just what is she to make of her 6-year-old daughter’s report that a strange boy came up to her at school and said “I love you. I want to kiss you.”?

On Sundays Shahin Mohajer cooks up the family menu for the week in their spare little apartment at the dead end of Carlton Way in Hollywood. That’s the only time she has to cook. Shahin works the night shift in a factory in Culver City. Her husband, Farid, works days as a refugee counselor--a job he took after 175 employment applications led him nowhere except into deeper and deeper desperation over supporting Shahin and their two young children.

The weekend is the only chance they get to spend time together. Shahin is proud of her cooking--she can whip up a pepperoni pizza from scratch, and it’s common for her to put out a plate of zolbia, a pastry made up of interstitial dried brown sugar, for a late afternoon snack. Sunday dinner is an event. The dining room table is crowded with plates of dolmeh, Khorostheh-esfena (lamb submerged in a small pool of walnut oil), squash borani, ghormeh-sabzi (another lamb dish), koku-sabzi (a vegetable-and-egg dish mixed with leek, pastry, coriander, green onion and garlic and ground walnut), salad, cheese and a heaping plate of flat floury bread one tears apart like soft cloth.

The meal is what all meals represent once they pass the point of gustatory and nutritional satisfaction, a communal event that in this case not only links the Mohajers with each other, and is an occasion for conversation and jokes, but with their lost homeland. Food feeds memory.

A few wedding photos hang on the wall over the dining room table, and if you look close, you can see blankets over the windows of the nuptials’ apartment. “Khomeini’s thugs would throw rocks through the windows if they knew,” Farid said.

The TV set, placed high on one of those shelved assemblages that hold books and stereos, plays on softly in a living room corner, occasionally drawing the eye of their tireless 2 1/2-year-old, Kyianoush, who tears around the apartment like an extension of one of his mechanical toys. At 6, daughter Camelia is entering a shy, demure phase, and often secrets herself dreamily away in her bedroom.

“Most Iranian names mean something,” Farid said. “ Kyianoush means ‘like the crown.’ Camelia is like the flower. Shahin means ‘king’s choice.’ Farid means ‘like no one else,’ and Mohajer means ‘emigrator.’ I’ve lived up to my name.”

The Mohajers have been in the United States less than a year. Farid, 35, was an Iranian Air Force battery officer subject to increasing danger by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s military escapades. He had been sent to Libya. In another field operation, in which artillery battle was so pitched that he didn’t sleep for 12 days, an Iraqi shellburst shattered seven of his teeth. He keeps hoping that somehow Shahin can realize her ambition to be a dentist, so that she can fix them. Shahin, 27, is the daughter of a factory owner.

“Before the revolution, the Iranian people felt secure about the future,” Farid said. “Now that’s changed.”

“They killed so many,” Shahin said, referring to the new guard. She estimates that as many as 5 million of pre-revolutionary Iran’s 40 million people have perished or left the country.

Both recall, if not an affinity, then at least a casual familiarity with Western cultural export such as rock ‘n’ roll and movies. “We saw a lot of American movies, like ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ ” Farid said. “We saw TV serials too, like ‘Colombo.’ Thursday was movie day. When you’re a student in Iran, you have to study hard.”

After dinner one recent Sunday, the Mohajers moved to the living room. The children went off to play in their bedroom. On TV, one of those interminable Christian stations played on inaudibly. Farid is a Zoroastrian--a sect that has yet to plug up the airwaves with its doctrinaire preening. Farid doesn’t watch.

“When you’re in Tehran, you don’t feel like you’re in Iran,” Farid said. “It’s more European, or even American. The major difference between our cultures is that Iranian families are still too dependent on each other. Everything else is changing. You can’t wear a tie outdoors--Khomeini’s people will think you’re trying to be American. Iranian culture is almost 2,500 years old, but now we’re afraid of losing it. A lot of Arabic words and other foreign words are taking over the Persian language.”

Farid’s deportment is one of imperturbability. When he wants to find a word in English, he reaches for a homemade dictionary that has categories marked off with colored plastic index markers and is subject to continuous update. On the left page is the English word or pictograph. The right is filled with Farid’s elegant, flowing Persian calligraphy.

“I make categories, like what you’d find in the bathroom. I show parts of the house, parts of the body, domestic and wild animals, natural phenomena, like clouds and weather. I even draw a car’s insides, so I don’t get confused when I go to the gas station.”

“I worry about the Iranian people losing their ceremony,” Shahin said. “Know what I mean? From a very long time ago--” She had such difficulty explaining herself in English, that she glanced conferringly at Farid and spoke in Farsi, for which she apologized.

“She’s talking about the changes in customs, especially about women,” Farid said.

“They want you to change your thinking,” Shahin said. “Women have a very hard time. They want us to wear the chador. I’m Muslim and proud, but if I wear a short sleeve, I’m not a bad woman.”

“The government makes the women think if they don’t wear chador, they’re streetwalkers.”

Shocked, Shahin drew a sharp intake of breath.

Farid, who is descended from a military family, brought out the family photo album. One of its pictures is of his father as a lieutenant, taken 51 years ago. The young face is officious, even stern. On the back is a poem written to his wife, which Farid translated: “I wish instead of this picture in your hands, I could feel your hands myself. When you touch this picture, my heart is with you.” Farid looked at the picture. His parents are now dead.

There is the rest of the usual family memorabilia. Wedding photos. Pictures of friends and relatives. Shahin in India, where for a brief time she studied dentistry, before her money ran out. (Iranians aren’t allowed to post currency out of the country; therefore she couldn’t get help from home.) Farid in front of a Hawk missile emplacement.

They lived well in Tehran, but the album and a few other family artifacts are all they’ve been able to carry with them, and they bring a certain talismanic charm against the grinding uncertainty of the present.

“I didn’t know anything about this country,” Shahin said. (Farid did, however. He took some Air Force technical training courses at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and Ft. Bliss in El Paso several years ago.) “I thought it’d be very secure. No one would bother anybody. I didn’t think I’d see so much crime. What you see on TV is the way people live. People kill or are afraid.”

They embarked on a duologue where one sentiment doesn’t echo the other. Farid played up the positive side of things; Shahin couldn’t help confessing weariness and disappointment.

“In Iran I worked 20 hours a day to pay off the bank,” Farid said. “I was trained here. I knew what to expect.”

“I thought after I developed a career I’d have a little time for tennis and books,” Shahin said. “I love to study. But I have to work all the time to take care of my children. We are always on the run.”

“In two months, we’ll be California residents,” Farid said proudly.

“Life is not just eating and sleeping,” Farid said. “I’d like to feel good about myself too.”

“Our countries are similar,” Farid said. “Except that in America you need credit very much. In Iran, credit is mostly trust. You pull a hair from your mustache as a signature of trust. You don’t need a check. You show your intention.”

The Mohajers don’t get out and around much, except for weekends at Santa Monica Beach or Griffith Park. Television offers them their window on the United States and the world. Farid isn’t especially concerned about how it will affect his children. “They don’t show the bad stuff, or if they do, at least they warn you,” he said. “In Germany, where we were before coming to America, they show everything. It’s awful. They don’t care if kids watch.”

Shahin is more concerned about what happens at school. “At first I was comfortable about my children. But the minute Camelia started seeing other children and the difference between our lives, well, we have to direct kids how to use freedom. A boy in school said to her, ‘I love you. I want to kiss you.’ It made me crazy. That is simple now, but maybe in 10 or 15 years we cannot stop her. How do I show her not to use drugs?”

“In Iranian culture, no one has a boyfriend or a girlfriend until they’re finished with high school or university,” Farid said. “I don’t like to see the talk on TV about schoolgirls having babies. I think it’s bad for the country. You walk in the street and see a young girl with a baby, you feel very sorry for her--a kid with a baby.”

On the subject of the relatively casual American attitude toward divorce, Farid said, “If the husband makes a mistake, the wife should not go away.”

“If she does that, her children cannot have a normal life,” Shahin said.

“In Iran, the wife tries to cool you off,” Farid said. “In America, if you get angry, they get angry too.”